mozilla/rust — pull request #10060 by alexcrichton (2013-10-25 00:55:09+00:00)
Title: Cache and buffer stdout per-task for printing

Almost all languages provide some form of buffering of the stdout stream, and
this commit adds this feature for rust. A handle to stdout is lazily initialized
in the Task structure as a buffered owned Writer trait object. The buffer
behavior depends on where stdout is directed to. Like C, this line-buffers the
stream when the output goes to a terminal (flushes on newlines), and also like C
this uses a fixed-size buffer when output is not directed at a terminal.

We may decide the fixed-size buffering is overkill, but it certainly does reduce
write syscall counts when piping output elsewhere. This is a *huge* benefit to
any code using logging macros or the printing macros. Formatting emits calls to
`write` very frequently, and to have each of them backed by a write syscall was
very expensive.

In a local benchmark of printing 10000 lines of "what" to stdout, I got the
following timings:

when | terminal | redirected
----------------------------------
before | 0.575s | 0.525s
after | 0.197s | 0.013s
C | 0.019s | 0.004s

I can also confirm that we're buffering the output appropriately in both
situtations. We're still far slower than C, but I believe much of that has to do
with the "homing" that all tasks due, we're still performing an order of
magnitude more write syscalls than C does.